Austria and the coffee-house – the one is inconceivable without the other. The origins of the Vienna coffee-house are woven in legend. In 1683, the Turks left behind them sacks of green beans at Vienna's gates (as well as a bakery product in the form of a crescent moon, later to become the croissant). It was allegedly a man named Kolschitzky who took possession of the sacks and opened the first Vienna coffee-house under the name "Zur Blauen Flasche". He became a coffee-maker, but was only moderately successful. Then one day he added sugar and milk to the bitter concoction, and the Viennese "melange" was born. It is a fact that by 1714 there were already 11 licensed coffee-makers in the city, and by the middle of the century, the coffee-house had become a place to read the newspaper, play cards and of course drink the ubiquitous glass of water with the coffee.
Under Emperor Josef, coffee-houses gained in popularity not only in the centre of the city, but also in the suburbs. It is said that the elegant Cafe Taroni was the inventor of the pavement cafe known in Viennese dialect as the Schanigarten, a consequence of the cafe's junior waiter Johann, in French Jean, and then regermanised back into Schani, being called to put the tables outside in fine weather with the expression "Schani, trag den Garten ausse!" ("Jean/Johann, take the garden out!"). The next heyday came during the Congress of Vienna. In the mid-19th century, the cafes-concerts were at their most popular, with Lanner, Strauss and Ziehrer providing the music to dance to.
The 1873 World Exhibition in Vienna spread the Viennese coffee-house's reputation around the world. The intellectuals and artists of the city were customarily not to be found at home, but rather in the cafe. It is claimed that even the postman automatically brought the writers' and artists' post to their regular coffee-house instead of their home address. The literature cafes such as the Griensteidl or the Central were frequented by Anton Kuh, Alfred Polgar, Egon Friedell and the passionate chess player Leonid Trotzky, while the artists gathered in the Kaffee Sperl. The legendary quotation from Peter Altenberg is indicative of the age: "Not at home but not in the fresh air either..." – he was a regular at the "Central", which he also gave as his postal address. The passion for coffee was so great that the "Herrenhof" even had a painter's colour chart with over 20 shades of brown from which the guests could choose the colour of the coffee they preferred.
During the war, recourse was had to ersatz coffee (made from chicory, figs, rye, barley or plum-stones), but the coffee-house was indestructible. It is and remains an institution, a piece of Austria, that no chain of establishments, no matter how large, will ever succeed in banishing completely.
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